Day-and-Night Coffee Room, Rice Hotel, Houston, Texas
HOTEL BARS REPLACED BY COFFEE ROOMS IN THE UNITED STATES
One effect of prohibition has been to lead many hotels to feature their coffee service, bringing back the modern type of coffee room illustrated above]
The important and indispensable part that sugar plays in the make-up of the American cup of coffee was ably set forth by Fred Mason,[372] vice-president of the American Sugar Refining Co., when he said:
The coffee cup and the sugar bowl are inseparable table companions. Most of us did not realize this until the war came, with its attendant restrictions on everything we did, and we found that the sugar bowl had disappeared from all public eating places. No longer could we make an unlimited number of trips to the sugar bowl to sweeten our coffee; but we had to be content with what was doled out to us with scrupulous care—a quantity so small at times that it gave only a hint of sweetness to our national beverage.
Then it was that we really appreciated how indispensable the proper amount of sugar was to a good, savory cup of coffee, and we missed it as much as we would seasoning from certain cooked foods. Secretly we consoled ourselves with the promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless war days.
Since sugar is so necessary to our enjoyment of this popular beverage, it is obvious that a considerable part of all the sugar we consume must find its way into the national coffee cup. The stupendous amount of 40,000,000,000 cups of coffee is consumed in this country each year. Taking two teaspoonfuls or two lumps as a fair average per cup, we find that about 800,000,000 pounds of sugar, almost one-tenth of our total annual consumption, are required to sweeten Uncle Sam's coffee cup. This is specially significant when one considers that, with the single exception of Australia, the United States consumes more sugar per capita than any country on earth.
Sugar adds high food value to the stimulative virtues of coffee. The beverage itself stimulates the mental and physical powers, while the sugar it contains is fuel for the body and furnishes it with energy. Sugar is such a concentrated food that the amount used by the average person in two cups of coffee is enough to furnish the system with more energy than could be derived from 40 oysters on the half-shell.
Since prohibition, the average citizen is drinking one hundred more cups of coffee a year than he did in the old days; and a good part of the increase is attributed to newly formed habits of drinking coffee between meals, at soda fountains, in tea and coffee shops, at hotels, and even in the homes. In other words, the increase is due to coffee drinking that directly takes the place of malt and spirituous liquors. There have come into being the hotel coffee room; the custom of afternoon coffee drinking; and free coffee-service in many factories, stores, and offices.
In colonial days, must or ale first gave way to tea, and then to coffee as a breakfast beverage. The Boston "tea party" clinched the case for coffee; but in the meantime, coffee was more or less of an after-dinner function, or a between-meals drink, as in Europe. In Washington's time, dinner was usually served at three o'clock in the afternoon, and at informal dinner parties the company "sat till sunset—then coffee."